Today the Institute of Chartered Accountants of the Caribbean held its 34th annual conference. The main vision for this conference is to discuss ways to improve the Caribbean economy through effective accounting. Now the conference comes at a fitting time given the current state of Government's cash strapped finances, reflected in the impending sale of BEL and BTL shares to the Social Security Board. While Belize's President of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Reynaldo Magana could not speak on that specific topic, he admitted that Government's accounting practices need to be improved and upgraded. Magana told us how this conference can assist. Also, one of the presenters Dr. Leroy Almendarez told us about the other major topics that have to address in Belize's outlook.
Reynaldo Magana, President, ICAB
"This is not just about the figures, it's about being professional, following the standards, making sure that the accountants in the region sing one song and not be singing different songs. We, as an accounting body, here as well as the Caribbean and globally, we follow international financial reporting standards of accounting. What we do here is, one, to provide updates to the professionals as well as provide guidance as to how to better service clientele as well as the government. One of the key things in this conference is the Governmental and Accounting Standards. What we're trying to do is as an institute, we are pledge assistance to the government to see how we can help them improve accounting and reporting. With regards to the public funds with the way how we see it at the moment is really accounting on a cash basis. Accounting on a cash basis is okay, but not the best form of accounting, for example, within industry we report on accrual basis of accounting whereby you would include all your assets and liabilities on your balance sheet. Going in that direction for the government would help them show what all assets they have and all liabilities they have as well."
Dr. Leroy Almendarez, Director of Foreign Trade
"My role is to talk about opportunities in the Caribbean, so it's taking a broader look into accounting. One of the things I'll be focusing on is services. Accounting services is one of those things that CARICOM tracks. The other thing we must look at is that there is a need to diversify the economy. We know that, in terms of trade, there is a trade imbalance or there's a deficit in terms of trading goods and there's a surplus in trading services."
But the conference was not only about evaluating Government's financial strategies; it was also about highlighting opportunities for the business community. The Co-founder of an international consulting firm called Zcloud told us about their business management software and how it can reshape your business operations.
Zelena Khan, Co-founder, Zcloud
"This conference is giving us the platform to launch a business software and companies across the Caribbean can access and use. The difference is that here is this is the number one cloud business management solution and it's around the world except in the Caribbean. That's one of the voids that I saw and I'm from Guyana so Caribbean is my heart. One of the motivations for starting Zcloud was to be able to bring the cloud 
solution here. It is not an accounting software, it's a business management software and the easy differentiation for that is for accounting you do all of your accounting functions, in a business management's perspective, you have your accounting, payroll, sales team, budgeting, forecasting, and every single aspect of your business that you manage is managed on that software. That software is called 'Netsuite" and it that has over 30 thousand customers around the world. Why are the Caribbean companies not on that software? That's what we're bringing here today."
The main sponsor of this event is Grant Thornton, one of the leading accountancy firms in the world. The conference ends tomorrow.
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